'Home cinema' with active monitors

[ramthelinefeed]

Not sure if this is the right room to ask this one,
and this may have been asked before...

Like many SOS readers, I have a home studio set up with a pair of active monitors fed with balanced signals from small desk and/or PC soundcard.

And I have a 'home cinema' set up round my telly in another room - with an 'A/V receiver' connected between the telly and disc players via HDMI cables, and to a motley collection of passive speakers via speaker cable (7.1/DubblyAtmos, since you ask!)

I have often wondered (not least when I'm moving house and setting things up in new rooms) if the home cinema side of things could be done with active speakers. But there rarely seems to be any straightforward way to connect studio-quality active monitors to domestic 'A/V receiver' units.

Have any SOS readers tried to construct such a thing?

[resistorman]

I use iLoud Micro monitors sitting on a shelf suspended from my TV’s mounting bracket sort of like a sound bar. They’re plugged directly into the TV analog output right now, but I’ve ordered an IR controlled preamp kit. They sound fantastic.

[blinddrew]

20-odd years ago you used to be able to buy home cinema processors as well as receivers. Frequently these were designed to integrate into an existing stereo set up so would just do the decoding and provide the amplifiers for the rear and center speakers. Some would, as far as I recall, offer you a full set of 5.1 line outs on RCA.
I have no idea if such a thing is still available, but if there is, Yamaha probably make it.

[ramthelinefeed]

yeah I guess that's the thing really - if there's "A/V receivers" on the market with line outs that would be the end of the matter.

I believe I had a BluRay player with 5.1's worth of phono line-outs at one point!

[Hugh Robjohns]

https://bryston.com/preamps/sp3/

[ramthelinefeed]

https://bryston.com/preamps/sp3/

Ah now that seems quite the thing - but of course I'd the the https://bryston.com/preamps/sp4/ model with Dubbly Atmos.

Am scared to look up what the price is...

[ramthelinefeed]

£18½ grand for a Bryston SP4 from https://www.analogueseduction.net/search/for/bryston/

Bung in a 7.1's worth of Genelecs and you're laughing, I guess

[Hugh Robjohns]

I didn't say it was affordable.... But it does illustrate that there are solutions to your desires...

[ramthelinefeed]

How comes it costs 10 times as much for a piece of kit that has a balanced line out instead of a speaker level out, though? Surely that means it is doing *less* amplification than a consumer AV receiver?

[Hugh Robjohns]

It does a lot more than most cheaper equivalents, it does it a lot better, its far better engineered with far better specs, and it has a 20 year warranty....

[Stratman57]

You are quite possibly missing an important point here, if you have a 5.1, or 7.1 surround system using powered speakers, then you have to have 6 or 8 power points to plug in your active speakers, so instead of having just cheap speaker cables, you now have maybe balanced line cables plus the associated mains feed for each channel.

My 85 watts per channel Yamaha a595a amp is still providing great surround sound, even without the subwoofer. So much so that the next door neighbours are complaining about the noise when I'm watching Blu-rays or streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney + which do full 5.1 surround sound and it's associated dynamic range.

Regards, Simon.

[Guest]

£18½ grand for a Bryston SP4 from https://www.analogueseduction.net/search/for/bryston/

Bung in a 7.1's worth of Genelecs and you're laughing, I guess

I have used Bryston SP4, On the audio side, it decodes everything, providing amazing flexibility even for multi-amped speakers and numerous subwoofers, and uses Dirac Live to create remarkable sound coherence. On the video side, HDMI delivered more than it promised (in my configuration, it passed Dolby Vision) and was as dependable as mass-market hardware.